Ross Douthat: uncertainty

Transcript context

…I don’t know what that means, though. I also don’t know. I don’t know how you distinguish that from essentially supernaturalist explanations. If you had asked me, five to ten years ago, my basic view about UFOs, I didn’t have strong views about them, but I would’ve said that most of what I’d read in the literature about personal encounters with supposed extraterrestrials seemed to line up reasonably well with pre-modern accounts of encounters with angels, demons, and maybe especially fairies. This is an argument that the ufologist, Jacques Vallee, made early in the UFO many decades ago, that if you compare an account of an alien abduction to an Irishman’s tale of being abducted by the Unseelie Court, there’re a lot of interesting similarities. There are two conclusions you could draw from that. You could say, well, there’s this union unconscious that human beings have that grants us these weird dream-like experiences, and in modern times, we attribute them to aliens, and we used to attribute them to fairies. Or you could be more of a supernaturalist and say there are beings out there who like to — pardon my language — fuck with us. They do it in different ways in different times and places. That seems to me to be the straightforward reading of the data on individual encounters, abductions, encounters, that stuff. I honestly don’t know what to make of the craft-zipping-around stuff. That’s part of why it’s interesting. I have difficulty fitting it into a non-supernaturalist paradigm. I think you can. You can say the best argument would be, these are extraterrestrial drones sent from deep space or from some observation base deep under the oceans if we’re going to get really kooky. This is what you’d expect from an advanced civilization many light years away. They can’t travel to every planet that has life on it, so they have some drones keeping an eye on things. I guess you could make that argument. If you make that argument, then you have to separate that from all the kind of paranormal UFO abduction stuff and say, “Well, these are just separate things. One belongs to the realm of religious, supernatural, Jungian experience, and one is literal aliens visiting us.” I find that’s unsatisfying. I feel if they aren’t Chinese drones, [laughs] if they aren’t native earth tech . . . I don’t know if it’s probabilistic reasoning or not. My mind wants there to be a connection between weird abduction stories and Navy pilot sightings. I guess it’s a case where I find the subject quite interesting, but I don’t want to make any kind of commitment because I think we just conspicuously lack evidence. I think there’s a contingent of Christian and religious interpreters of this stuff who say, “Look, it’s probably demonic.” It’s basically how the old gods of paganism, who are really demons, get back in. Instead of pretending to be angels of light, they pretend to be ETs of light, and so on. “Look, it’s probably demonic.” It’s basically how the old gods of paganism, who are really demons, get back in. Instead of pretending to be angels of light, they pretend to be ETs of light, and so on. If you had my friend Rod Dreher on, who writes a lot about mystical issues and has lately started writing about UAPs — he’s very interested in that argument. I think, were that the case, it would be quite striking and strange that there would be actual craft of some kind involved. Certainly, a kind of departure from what we know about supernatural interventions otherwise, an escalation that would be strange. Also, if I were, let’s say, a Syrian demi-demon trying to get worshipers back after all these thousands of years, I don’t understand the end game, [laughs] of sending a bunch of crafts zipping around to freak out Navy pilots. I don’t know what’s the plan there. I’m trying to be resolutely open-minded.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.